JONATHAN EDWARDS IN MUFTI

THE HARTFORD COURANT

CThe first time Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. ran for president, in 1976, he beat Jimmy Carter in six primaries with seemingly little effort.

Mr. Brown, the former governor of California, is again a presidential prospect, this time mostly by his own invitation, rather than by entreaties from fans. He has announced the formation of an exploratory committee.

In his salad days, Mr. Brown's quirkiness was considered refreshing. He was bright, irreverent and outside the political establishment. He failed to observe the political conventions: He didn't kiss babies or begin speeches with jokes. His concerns were cosmic. He said that Americans faced an energy crisis, that we must attend to the growing economic power of the East, and that our young people were aimless and needed a civilian conservation corps to occupy them for a couple of years before college.

Cynicism and moral corruption afflict the 1990s, says Mr. Brown today. The problem is the health of American democracy itself, the spirit of which is as dead here as it is alive in Eastern Europe. Half of the American citizenry fails to vote. It is not that they are apathetic, he says, but that they are abstaining. Talk about Willie Horton or -- on the other hand -- "the Massachusetts miracle" only trivializes the debate.

Politics does not speak to more and more Americans, who are opting out, Mr. Brown warns. The issues are not the people's and the politicians are not the people's and there is a very good reason why: Politics is for sale. Mr. Brown calls it a "hostile takeover of the democratic system, engineered by a confederacy of corruption, careerism and campaign consulting." Mr. Brown says he will limit contributions to his campaign to $100 a person. Such a campaign can only succeed with mass support. It seems apt that the film director Frank Capra, maker of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," died on the day that Mr. Brown announced his plans.

Can he win? Well, the Democratic race is wide open. Does he at least deserve to be taken seriously, this man who was inaugurated governor of California to the tunes of a Sufi choir? It is less flaky to retreat from politics in pursuit of self-knowledge, as Mr. Brown did, than to retreat, in terror of oneself, into politics, as some politicians do.

These days Mr. Brown, 53, is more apt to quote Lincoln than rock musicians or Zen masters. He sounds more like Jonathan Edwards in mufti than a New Age flower child. The issue today, in Mr. Brown's view, hasn't changed since Lincoln's day. As Honest Abe said more than a century ago, we are confronted with the "necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity."